The world went crazy for Wendy Davis this week, and rightly so. In her weekly
Paper Tiger column, Katy Brand looks at the woman behind the epic
11-hour filibuster to break an anti-abortion bill.

"If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Remember that? The remark made by Republican former US Senator Todd Akin last year lost him his campaign, and some argue it came to be seen as part of a more widespread attitude to abortion within the Grand Old Party that ultimately cost them the entire 2012 election.

For a while following Obama’s return to the White House, there was much public head-scratching and soul searching amongst the American right. The democratic process had clearly indicated that there was not enough support among American people for the kind of stringent reforms to abortion legislation that they seemed to be in favour of. For a while, it looked as if they might even acknowledge that the were seriously out of step with what most people wanted and they would need to modernise swiftly and comprehensively if they were to gain power again.

Well, it seems six months is a long time in politics – certainly long enough to forget about Mitt Romney’s bruising defeat and for the Republicans in Texas to launch a state bill that would effectively close 37 out of 42 abortion clinics over night. It was all set to go ahead, along with other legislative changes that would make a safe, legal abortion beyond the reach of thousands and thousands of decent but desperate Texan women. Well, it was all set until Democratic State Senator Wendy Davisturned up.

The vote had to take place cleanly and clearly before midnight. The only way to disrupt and prevent it would be afilibuster of epic proportions,and as Davis stepped into a pair of comfortable pink running shoes it was clear this was what she was preparing for. She would need to speak constantly for 13 hours without straying off the topic, without going to the loo, without eating, without sitting down, without leaning on any furniture and without stopping.

She very nearly managed it – as she approached her 11th hour of continuous debate, she was prevented from carrying on with a claim that she had gone off topic. The voting began. The largely Republican senate voted in favour of the bill at almost exactly midnight. They claimed victory. It was later thrown out as it was found to have taken place just past the legal threshold. Davis had done it. She said simply that she was ‘overwhelmed.’

Throughout her political career, Davis has faced down challenges from the all-powerful Texas Republican party. She has seen off an attempt to redefine the boundaries of her ward so that it would be automatically become part of a safe conservative seat. In 2011 she filibustered an attempt by the Republican party to cut education funding across the state. She seems to stand as a lone voice in the state senate, determined to prevent local conservatives who are disgruntled at having a Democratic President they neither like nor respect nor, in some cases, even truly believe is an American, from turning Texas into a Republican principality (if that is not too much of a contradiction in terms) within the USA – a sort of ‘rogue state’. It’s not easy – her office was petrol bombed in 2008.

As more details of Wendy Davis’s personal life and history have emerged, her heroic attempts to stop a return to the dark ages in Texas can be seen in context. She, along with three siblings, was brought up by a single mother who had no more than a Sixth Grade education. She was working and contributing to family finances by the age of 14, married by 18, pregnant at 19, divorced by 20. At 21 she was bringing up a child on her own and living in a trailer park. "Trailer trash" is possibly the way some of her current Senate colleagues may have described her had they trodden on her head on the way to the next big real estate deal.

But Wendy Davis was doing something else too – she was getting an education. And a very good one at that – against all the odds, she graduated with honours from Texas Christian University, and then even more incredibly given the way Ivy League universities operate in the US along with the expense, she went to Harvard Law School. She continued to bring up her daughter and returned to Texas to become a successful lawyer, and now game changing politician.

It is no wonder that she feels so strongly about education funding – without it she would not be what she is today. It is no wonder she feels so strongly about the protection of women’s rights and upholding sovereignty over their own bodies – she has lived the life of a woman who had no such choices, and she is the daughter of a woman who had no such choices. There is nothing to say that given their time again, Davis and her mother might have chosen an abortion at the appropriate time and I have no doubt that they love their children fiercely. But Davis has the life experience and compassion it seems that her largely male Republican colleagues completely lack.

The world went crazy for Wendy Davis this week, and rightly so. Through sheer force of will and physical strength, she managed to prevent a bill passing that would have put women’s lives in danger across the entire state of Texas, taking legislation back decades. Conservative Republicans will keep trying to bring this about, but to paraphrase Todd Akin, it seems the female body really does have ways to shut that whole thing down.